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Introduction to Linux - A Hands on Guide

This guide was created as an overview of the Linux Operating System, geared toward new users as an exploration tour and getting started guide, with exercises at the end of each chapter.
For more advanced trainees it can be a desktop reference, and a collection of the base knowledge needed to proceed with system and network administration. This book contains many real life examples derived from the author's experience as a Linux system and network administrator, trainer and consultant. They hope these examples will help you to get a better understanding of the Linux system and that you feel encouraged to try out things on your own.

Unfortunately the stock slackware initrd doesn't support their use to identify luks encrypted devices to unlock, but I took part in a thread a while back that came up with some patches. Have a look at this post and the thread that it is in. It was a while ago though and may or may not apply cleanly.

And when I reboot, the system is able to find and mount the SecStor encrypted drive. Where as before, the boot would fail due to the order of the drives being changed.

When I started the installation I wrote LILO to a floppy disk. Once I got everything up and running I installed grub from slackbuilds.org, configured and wrote it to the SCSI drive (/dev/sda).

I reordered the drives in BIOS but when I rebooted my SCSI drive remained as /dev/sda. It seems that before I changed the order it would become /dev/sde and the system would not boot. Since everything is working, I going with "If it works don't fool with it!"

Yes, that was exactly what that other thread was attempting to address. If you're not using an encrypted root then things get much easier as you can use crypttab with UUIDs, LABELs or even LVM LV device names, as you've already discovered.

After seeing the reports on the ext4 bug, I rebuilt my systems and returned to jfs. I was able to get this solved my determining the drive order after booting. It still went to the single user prompt since I could not open my encrypted root directory. But I was able to see where Slackware put the drive containing my root directory. Then I had to reboot from the installation CD-ROM, rerun initrd pointing to the booting drive, update lilo.conf to install lilo on the booting drive,

run lilo to install lilo <-- critical

and everything works. I still mount the rest of my drives by UUID.

It seems the difficulty is to find where the root partition lies once Slackware is installed. Running an encrypted /root makes it a little more difficult, but once I figured out how the pieces looked, the puzzle came together rather nicely.